Blood Changed?

[BookofMormonLuvr]

I remember being taught on a couple occasions while growing up that when we enter the waters of baptism that our blood is literally changed to the blood found in the veins of descendants of the 12 Tribes of Israel.

Was that a common belief among the members?

Is it still taught on some level within the Wards and Stakes of the church?

If you believe it, what scriptural reference would you use to justify it?

Thanks!

[Calm]

I remember being taught on a couple occasions while growing up that when we enter the waters of baptism that our blood is literally changed to the blood found in the veins of descendants of the 12 Tribes of Israel.

Was that a common belief among the members?

Is it still taught on some level within the Wards and Stakes of the church?

I was never personally taught it though I heard of it as being taught in the past. I highly doubt that it is taught nowadays except by a very few who are overly fond of fringe ideas.

Actual doctrine taught:

http://www.lds.org/ensign/1991/01/of-the-house-of-israel?lang=eng

Edited July 12, 2013 by calmoriah

[canard78]

Never heard of it. I would probably snort if I heard someone teach it in class.

Having said that, someone the other day said that the scriptures teach us that every time we repent our bodies change at a molecular level and that's how we get our bodies ready for celestial glory. I managed to keep my snorting on silent mode that time.

Edited July 12, 2013 by canard78

[volgadon]

Joseph Fielding Smith talked a lot about the concept.

[Duncan]

I only heard it once in institute and people were saying that's ridiculous, your blood may symbolically change but who even knows what that means, I want my heart to change!

[cinepro]

Joseph Smith said this:

There are two Comforters spoken of. One is the Holy Ghost, the same as given on the day of Pentecost, and that all Saints receive after faith, repentance, and baptism. This first Comforter or Holy Ghost has no other effect than pure intelligence. It is more powerful in expanding the mind, enlightening the understanding, and storing the intellect with present knowledge, of a man who is of the literal seed of Abraham, than one that is a Gentile, though it may not have half as much visible effect upon the body; for as the Holy Ghost falls upon one of the literal seed of Abraham, it is calm and serene; and his whole soul and body are only exercised by the pure spirit of intelligence; while the effect of the Holy Ghost upon a Gentile, is to purge out the old blood, and make him actually of the seed of Abraham. That man that has none of the blood of Abraham (naturally) must have a new creation by the Holy Ghost. In such a case, there may be more of a powerful effect upon the body, and visible to the eye, than upon an Israelite, while the Israelite at first might be far before the Gentile in pure intelligence.

History of the Church, Volume 3 p. 380

(Emphasis added)

Brigham Young said this:

Again, if a pure Gentile firmly believes the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and yields obedience to it, in such a case I will give you the words of the Prophet Joseph—"When the Lord pours out the Holy Ghost upon that individual he will have spasms, and you would think that he was going into fits."

Joseph said that the Gentile blood was actually cleansed out of their veins, and the blood of Jacob made to circulate in them; and the revolution and change in the system were so great that it caused the beholder to think they were going into fits.

http://en.fairmormon.org/Journal_of_Discourses/2/42

So it does have some basis in past teachings.

[Nevo]

I highly doubt that it is taught nowadays except by a very few who are overly fond of fringe ideas.

https://www.lds.org/manual/print/new-testament-student-study-guide/the-epistle-of-paul-the-apostle-to-the-romans/romans-9-10-living-according-to-the-law-of-christ?lang=eng

[Calm]

So it does have some basis in past teachings.

There seems to be a great need in the early church to make things as concrete and tied to what they saw as the material/physical world as possible.

I wonder if there is any mention of any specific "pure Gentiles" that experienced such a change in Joseph's opinion/knowledge (depending on how one chooses to read his comments).

[Calm]

https://www.lds.org/...christ?lang=eng

I wonder if the various teachers using the manual define it so specifically as actually changing the blood from one physical heritage (DNA line) to another or if the change is literal in a different way. I don't think my daughter's teacher mentioned this part of the lesson (she was homeschooled and because of her anxiety, I was present during every lesson she had which was once a week so tended to be not so detailed as the usual ones, I suspect).

Parents out there, ask your kids if they remember what they were taught about this specifically.

[Calm]

The problem I see is that due to whatever the technical term, if Abraham had any descendants how many thousands of years ago, pretty much everyone in the world by now would be one of his descendants. There would therefore such a low percentage of possibility that someone could be a "pure Gentile" unless perhaps we found a very isolated and inbred tribe somewhere...and how could one prove it?

So it is fine as a theory, but it's one of those theories inapplicable to the real world.

And yes, I know that JS's comments mean he likely believed he saw this happen so I am contradicting him.

while the Israelite at first might be far before the Gentile in pure intelligence

Would seem he is not defining intelligence here in the same way we do. Would be interested if anyone has more detail that could clarify how he defined it outside of the "glory of God" or the eternal core/element of the Self.

Edited July 12, 2013 by calmoriah

[thesometimesaint]

Never heard of it.

[Gohan]

I had a religion professor a few semesters back that taught it. Didn't quite know what to think there, but the story he shared with it was interesting leastways.

[Calm]

the story he shared with it was interesting leastways.

Any details you are able to share with us (I need major distraction now and am getting tired of watching DC Superhero movies)? Edited July 12, 2013 by calmoriah

[Gohan]

Any details you are able to share with us (I need major distraction now and am getting tired of watching DC Superhero movies)?

Tired of DC superheroes? Such a thing cannot be! :-P

Without getting into too many of the personal details he gave, it involved their adoption of a young child who had some severe food allergies. He stated that after the child had been baptized/sealed to them only a short time later, that the severe allergic reactions no longer occurred. He attributed that to the child's blood changing upon baptism and the sealing to them.

I figured there was likely another explanation, but it was an uplifting day of class regardless.

Edited July 12, 2013 by Gohan

[volgadon]

Would seem he is not defining intelligence here in the same way we do. Would be interested if anyone has more detail that could clarify how he defined it outside of the "glory of God" or the eternal core/element of the Self.

Intelligence is our capacity to respond to light and truth. The blood thing is similar to some Kabbalistic concepts of Israel's uniquity, but expressed in fairly different terms.

[Calm]

Tired of DC superheroes? Such a thing cannot be! :-P

Without getting into too many of the personal details he gave, it involved their adoption of a young child who had some severe food allergies. He stated that after the child had been baptized/sealed to them only a short time later, that the severe allergic reactions no longer occurred. He attributed that to the child's blood changing upon baptism and the sealing to them.

I figured there was likely another explanation, but it was an uplifting day of class regardless.

My son has a remarkable experience with a blinding migraine the day of his baptism (I actually had to dress him and his dad carried him to the car with his head covered to block the light completely, though by the time we were at the chapel it had subsided enough he could get out and walk on his own though still in a lot of pain). As he came up out of the water, the pain vanished. His eyes were quite wide and surprised as he walked up the steps and explained to me it was all gone.

We considered that a witness to him of the power of faith and a literal translation of the symbolism of the cleansing/healing power of the baptism at a level well suited for him at eight years though similar to a healing from a blessing (his dad had given him one earlier which we believe was what allowed him to make it into the car as in all other cases of migraines for him in the past, it was required that he throw up and then pass out for several hours of sleep...they had never just gone away with time), not a permanent physical change in his body....though from that time forth his migraines were much less frequent and less severe, though that could have been a result of learning how to avoid them and growing up. I'll have to ask him if he's ever had one as bad since then as I don't remember him ever vomiting from a headache after that, though he had to sleep some off.

Edited July 12, 2013 by calmoriah

[mfbukowski]

When you do some calculating about how many ancestors you have in about a hundred generations or so, it is virtually incredible to believe that there is one person on this earth who does not carry "the blood of Israel" in his veins, considering also how many people were IN "Israel" during biblical times.

If you are of European ancestry, you are probably a descendant of Charlemagne. And that is only one person. You might have a trillion ancestors, mathematically, and that's more people than have lived on this earth- so guess what- there are crossovers and duplications of lines,

Of course there was an "Adam and Eve", but whether or not they got written up in the bible is another question.

Chang was not a genealogist who had decided to make me his personal project. Instead, he is a statistician at Yale who likes to think of genealogy as a mathematical problem. When you draw your genealogy, you make two lines from yourself back to each of your parents. Then you have to draw two lines for each of them, back to your four grandparents. And then eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents, and so on. But not so on for very long. If you go back to the time of Charlemagne, forty generations or so, you should get to a generation of a trillion ancestors. That’s about two thousand times more people than existed on Earth when Charlemagne was alive.

The only way out of this paradox is to assume that our ancestors are not independent of one another. That is, if you trace their ancestry back, you loop back to a common ancestor. We’re not talking about first-cousin stuff here–more like twentieth-cousin. This means that instead of drawing a tree that fans out exponentially, we need to draw a web-like tapestry.

In a paper he published in 1999 [pdf], Chang analyzed this tapestry mathematically. If you look at the ancestry of a living population of people, he concluded, you’ll eventually find a common ancestor of all of them. That’s not to say that a single mythical woman somehow produced every European by magically laying a clutch of eggs. All this means is that as you move back through time, sooner or later some of the lines in the genealogy will cross, meeting at a single person.

http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/05/07/charlemagnes-dna-and-our-universal-royalty/

So with this information, we are all of the blood of Israel anyway.

If we are all descendants of Charlemagne,-one human being- it is likely that given the number of people in ancient times "of the blood of Israel" who had just as good a shot at spreading their DNA as presumably Charlemagne did, and considering that the total number of the ancient carriers of "the blood of Israel" was perhaps in the millions, it is virtually inconceivable that there is anyone who does NOT have it "in their veins".

No literal changes of blood necessary.

[Calm]

It makes me wonder if JS saw some examples of individuals who had spasms "[w]hen the Lord pour[ed] out the Holy Ghost upon that individual" and made the assumption of what the cause was.

I would really love to know how he came to this belief/teaching.

[theplains]

I remember being taught on a couple occasions while growing up that when we enter the waters of baptism that our blood is literally changed to the blood found in the veins of descendants of the 12 Tribes of Israel.

Was that a common belief among the members?

Is it still taught on some level within the Wards and Stakes of the church?

If you believe it, what scriptural reference would you use to justify it?

Thanks!

This is currently taught in the chapter 21 of the Religion 430-431 - Doctrines of the Gospel

Student Manual. The bottom of page 57 says the following:

"This first Comforter or Holy Ghost has no other effect than pure intelligence. It is more

powerful in expanding the mind, enlightening the understanding, and storing the intellect

with present knowledge, of a man who is of the literal seed of Abraham, than one that is

a Gentile, though it may not have half as much visible effect upon the body; for as the

Holy Ghost falls upon one of the literal seed of Abraham, it is calm and serene; and his

whole soul and body are only exercised by the pure spirit of intelligence; while the effect

of the Holy Ghost upon a Gentile, is to purge out the old blood, and make him actually

of the seed of Abraham. That man that has none of the blood of Abraham (naturally)

must have a new creation by the Holy Ghost. In such a case, there may be more of a

powerful effect upon the body, and visible to the eye, than upon an Israelite, while the

Israelite at first might be far before the Gentile in pure intelligence” (Smith, Teachings,

149–50).

Regards,

Jim

[CV75]

It makes me wonder if JS saw some examples of individuals who had spasms "[w]hen the Lord pour[ed] out the Holy Ghost upon that individual" and made the assumption of what the cause was.

I would really love to know how he came to this belief/teaching.

Since blood typing as we know it wasn't put into place until the 20th century, I think Joseph Smith had something else in mind. We know that a person's spirit and the Holy Spirit can impact the body, so why not something in the blood so as to make the covenant match the lineage (“God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham.”--I've wondered whether "these stones" are His servants, or even the "revelation" (Matt. 16: 17-18) that each authentic convert receives. But even if not, the Gentiles can be made into the children of Abraham better than stones can.

Edited July 14, 2013 by CV75

[brightpath]

If a person is not Jewish(Judah) or a Lamanite(Joseph) they are a Gentile. The lost 10 tribes are just that, lost unto the world. Only God knows where they are. They will remain hidden until the Lamanites build the New Jerusalem. At this point they will come from the north with there prophets and scriptures. Blood is not changed through baptism.

[Calm]

The lost 10 tribes are just that, lost unto the world. Only God knows where they are.

And if God reveals them through Patriarchal blessings? Or do you deny there is any revelation in such?

[brightpath]

And if God reveals them through Patriarchal blessings? Or do you deny there is any revelation in such?

Patriarchal blessings are inaccurate and create a false hope. Its not a revelation.

[canard78]

Patriarchal blessings are inaccurate and create a false hope. Its not a revelation.

Patriarchal blessings are not revelation? What are they then?

I'm not sure I'm going to get any sense out of this conversation but I'll try anyway.

[Buzzard]

When Elder Lee was exed, there was a lot of bitterness among the Navajo, and one of the Seventy (excuse my dimming memory over this) went down to a special meeting held at Window Rock, on the reservation. One of the Navajo brethren stated that as descendants of Lehi, they had the blood of Israel, and that Anglos were mere adoptees. The GA stated that upon baptism, our blood is physically changed to Israelite blood. Not exactly in General Conference, but not all that long ago, and not exactly a fringe source.